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SYNOPSIS
The story is set at Priti-Nu, a "gifted and trophy" charter-designer high school with absurdly strict rules, "hyper as a viper" teachers, nosey parents, power cliques, and insufferable students who consider themselves "perfectly perfect," even though all they know how to do is get perfect scores on the multiple-choice "bubble test."
One by one, we meet the crazy leaders of the Priti-Nu student body: the pompous faux-athlete Squush, the bogus yo-boy theater star Ko-Jo, the student-government control freak Zooba, the SAT-vocabulary Boopee, the sleep-deprived Pitsi, the guy-trap Liz-Liz, and the radical outcast Kattiscla (among others). A newcomer, Frankie-Who wants to try out for a role in a show, which the power clique won't let him do. They soon admit that they're so busy bubble testing that they don't put on any shows, play any sports games, or anything else.
When Frankie-Who and Kattiscla don't score perfectly on the bubble test, the school's reputation—and its students' college prospects—are imperiled. When the school's founder (old Ebenezer MaKiddo) asks the student body to select two students to go climb Mt. Everest, the power clique sees this as a chance to restore their school's reputation by banishing Frankie-Who and Kattiscla. Meanwhile, Frankie-Who has defied the school's anti-kissing rule, ticketing himself for detention, winning over the girls' and complicating the power clique's plot.
In Act Two, things start going wrong at Priti-Nu. On a dare, the girls soccer team play and lose a real game, and learn in other ways that they're not so perfect. The power clique blames this on Frankie-Who and Kattiscla, makes everyone fearful that they'll be turned down by "the c-word" (college) unless the two are expelled, and then trump up disciplinary charges against the two. But before the "narcs" can come arrest them, MaKiddo arrives—except it isn't the founder, it's his son. It turns out young MaKiddo has a score to settle with his dad, who turns out to be Bennie MaKiddo of Hollywood, lifelong sleazer of the teen culture, now trying to make a new fortune off of a new chain of de-sleazing schools, of which Priti-Nu is the flagship.
Young MaKiddo reveals that Priti-Nu is actually the setting for a reality TV series ("School Survivor") in which the student body let itself get suckered into booting two people, supposedly to go to Mount Everest—and that their perfect bubble test scores will set the standard for students nationwide. If they get perfect scores, all students in America will also have to get perfect scores—and give up music, art, and theater until they do.
The only way the Priti-Nubians can save the students of America is to fail the bubble test—which they can't do, even when blindfolded. But, thanks to Kattiscla, they learn to think "out of the bubble," whereupon they locate a few people who can in fact fail the bubble test: people their parents' age, in the audience. The cast gives the audience a ridiculous bubble test, which they fail, thereby saving the youth of America from Bennie MaKiddo. In the end, the Priti-Nu students rejoice at being less than perfect, out from the stress, and liberated from their "gifted and trophy" status.
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